Northvolt Powers Ahead with New German Battery Plant

Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--Weeks after announcing plans to build a new electric vehicle (EV) battery plant in Sweden, Europe's fastest growing battery company, Northvolt (Stockholm, Sweden), has announced plans for its first plant in Germany.

The company said that its third gigafactory will be based in Germany's so-called "clean energy valley", at Heide, Schleswig-Holstein, in the north of the country. Northvolt was formed in 2015 by Peter Carlsson and Paolo Cerruti, two former senior executives at Tesla (NYSE:TSLA). The Northvolt Drei plant's annual potential production capacity of 60 gigawatt-hours (GWh), enough for roughly 1 million EVs. It will boost the company's overall production capacity to 170 GWh, much of it still under development. Commissioning is planned for 2025 and more than 3,000 jobs will be created.

Northvolt only completed the construction of its first--and Europe's first homegrown--EV battery gigafactory in Skelleftea, Sweden in January. The plant aims to start large-scale manufacturing this year with an initial annual capacity of 16 GWh, or enough batteries for 250,000 cars, and this will ramp up to at least 32 GWh by 2024, with the potential to expand to 60 GWh in the future. For additional information, see January 11, 2022, article--Europe's First EV Battery 'Gigafactory' Starts Production.

Carlsson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Northvolt, commented: "We're excited to announce Northvolt Drei--a project which fits well into a promising future cluster of clean technology ventures emerging in northern Germany and advances the wider European transition towards a sustainable society within which Germany plays a crucial role."

The Heide location was chosen as the region has the cleanest energy grid in Germany. It is characterised by a surplus of electricity generated by onshore and offshore wind and reinforced by clean energy provided through grid interconnections to Denmark and Norway. The company claimed the lithium-ion batteries produced will have "the lowest environmental footprint in continental Europe".

"It matters how we produce a battery cell," Carlsson said. "If you use coal in your production, you embed a fair amount of CO2 into your battery, but if we use clean energy, we can build a very sustainable product. Our philosophy is that new energy-intensive industries, such as battery manufacturing, should be established in actual geographical proximity to where the clean energy is produced."

To date, Northvolt has more than US$50 billion in orders from key customers, including BMW, Fluence, Scania, Volkswagen, Volvo Cars and Polestar. The company is also working on plant projects in Norway, Poland and Portugal.

Northvolt Drei will source significant volumes of its raw material requirements from recycled battery metals, part of the company's overall goal to source 50% of its raw material needs from recycling by 2030. The site will also host an on-site battery recycling plant to reuse "by-products from the production process and provide a sustainable solution for end-of-life electric vehicle batteries recovered from European markets."

Industrial Info recently reported on Northvolt's latest expansion plans to transform a closed paper mill in Sweden into a new gigafactory. For additional information, see March 8, 2022, article--Swedish Papermill Chosen for New Northvolt EV Battery Gigafactory.

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